This was just a short piece at iOS Musician, but it made me firstly look at Live 9 and especially the part of that page that talks about iOS and Android controllers, and also look at Push as well, and both of those things got me thinking.
Of course it's good to see that Ableton acknowledge the many applications that have grown up around but it does make me wonder if they'll ever do anything in the mobile space themselves. They don't have to of course, other have done a very good job of it so far, so you could argue that it becomes less of a priority.
But the description of Push got me thinking. The refer to it as "An instrument for song creation that fits in your backpack with your laptop", and that sounds kind of mobile to me, or at least heading in that direction.
It makes me wonder if in time we could see a Push Mikro in the same way as we saw Maschine Mikro? Who knows. One thing is for sure, Ableton acknowedge that mobile is not going away, that it's a valuable part of the ecosystem and that you can't ignore it.
That's good enough for now.
I’m sure they are thinking about it. iPads aren’t powerful enough to run Live 9 grade software yet, but it’s a matter of time. Tim Cook said that they sold 100 million iPads in just 2.5 years. So you could imagine the next generation of musicians will be making music on tablets or similar devices. If Ableton is not thinking about porting or making a mobile version of Live next few years, someone else will beat them to it. As they say, disrupt yourself or be disrupted.
ReplyDeletePush is a cool concept, but I can’t help but think that you are still kind of detached from the actual software (Live). Live’s user interface provides a wealth of information and UI controls, Push only gives you a subset of that. Sure, Push provides a tactile interface, but, to me, the system still feels disconnected. That’s why I can not wait till tablets are powerful enough to let the apps (Live grade apps) be the audio engine and controller at the same time.